


The Ghost in the Spare Room

by framboise



Series: A Westerosi Halloween [6]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Fluff and Humor, Ghosts, Roommates, Salty Adults, Spells & Enchantments, blatantly inspired by Kit's new photoshoot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-29
Updated: 2017-10-29
Packaged: 2019-01-23 11:57:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12506876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/framboise/pseuds/framboise
Summary: Sansa’s new flat is perfect; perfect, that is, except for the half-naked ghost who lives in the spare room and spends his time chain-smoking ghost cigarettes, drinking orange juice, reading his magazines, and making sarcastic comments about her life choices.Can you kill someone for being extremely annoying, even if they’re already dead? Asking for a friend, she texts Margaery three weeks in.





	The Ghost in the Spare Room

**Author's Note:**

> this is part of a series of standalone multipairing stories for Halloween, and is obviously inspired by Kit's new photoshoot.
> 
> and if you want visuals for this fic I made a graphic [here](https://framboise-fics.tumblr.com/post/166906000052/sansas-new-flat-is-perfect-perfect-that-is)

 

 

 

Sansa's new rented flat is perfect - hardwood floors, bedroom reading nook, wall of shelves for her books, and a cosy working fire in the living room. Perfect, that is, except for the half-naked ghost who lives in the spare bedroom and spends his time chain-smoking ghost cigarettes, drinking orange juice, reading his magazines, and making sarcastic comments about her life choices.

Melisandre, the somewhat strange woman who Sansa had rented her flat from, had explained that the spare bedroom was a 'cosmic waiting room' and that the ghost, who told her his name was Jon, was completely harmless.

Be that as it may, when Sansa signed the rental contract she didn't agree to share her space with someone so bloody _annoying_. Nor a roommate that never got dressed properly and swanned about in the same orange silk kimono and tiny briefs.

She'd offered to bring him some new clothes back from the shops but he said that these were the ones he was stuck with, and then asked her if she wanted to get him something from the ghost emporium instead which she had thought was a real place until she realised he was mocking her. _I was just trying to be nice!_ she had said, and he had smiled that annoying, smug, smile at her and she had retreated to her own room and slammed the door a little too hard.

 

"Can you walk through walls?" she asks, the first day she moves in, trying to get her head around living with an actual _ghost_.

"No." He shakes his head. "I use doors like everyone else."

"But you're stuck in this flat?" she clarifies.

"Yup. These four walls," he says nonchalantly.

"You can't go outside _ever_ ," she says.

"Never ever," he says with a little sad smile that makes her feel bad for him. At least until she is woken up that night by the tinny thumping beats of a cassette player that sounds like it's jammed right against her wall.

"Can you turn the music down, please?" she asks (shouts) through the wall.

"Sure!" he calls back. "Not a fan of music?" he asks, and she grits her teeth.

"Not at 2am!" she replies breezily, politely.

"Each to their own, I guess!" he shouts, and she very almost says something else to stop him getting the last word before she realises that they could be here for hours, and turns over to try and get back to sleep.

Luckily the next day is a Saturday so she can lie-in and won't have to arrive at work already in a bad mood. Sansa is currently working as a legal secretary for a slimy lawyer named Petyr Baelish, trying to save up enough money to study a masters in Child Education and start a career in something she actually enjoys.

"What's your job?" she asks Jon that morning over breakfast, still feeling dozy.

"Job?" he replies, turning down the corner of the magazine he's currently reading. As far as Sansa can tell, the only things Jon owns are the clothes he has on, his single pack of cigarettes, a cassette player with two tapes, a mound of magazines, a rickety wooden table in his bedroom with twelve teacups and two teapots on it, and a mattress on the floor. The magazines don't seem to follow any particular theme but all look well-thumbed.

"I'm a ghost," he says, staring at her. "That's my job."

"Right," she says, nodding and looking away. Are ghosts generally more attractive than living people? She sneaks a look back at his full lips and that wild curly hair that looks soft enough to touch.

"And you can touch things?" she checks.

"As long as they're not living," he says.

"Oh, so you can't touch people."

"No, look," he says, and leans over. When he tries to place his hand over hers, it goes straight through to the table underneath and feels like a patch of cold air on her skin.

Sansa doesn't like to think about not be able to touch anyone, she's always been very tactile, as long as it's not Baelish who's doing the touching - a man who persists in cheerfully offering her 'shoulder massages' even though she's always refused them.

Is it rude to ask a ghost when they died, she thinks, watching Jon drink his orange juice, a supply of which gets delivered each week - and how is it that a ghost can consume real orange juice but nothing else? he only shrugged when she had asked.

"So when did you– when did you, you know–" she waves a hand towards him.

"When did I become this ruggedly handsome? I was born this way, sweetheart."

She rolls her eyes, ignoring the warmth that spreads through her at that particular pet name.

"No, when did you," she sighs, "become a _ghost_."

"Oh," he says, looking uninterested. "The mid-90s," he says.

"Is that your explanation for the briefs then?" she asks, crossing her arms.

"Yup, boxer briefs didn't exist then, it was either briefs or boxers, we were proper manly men."

She snorts. "That's such bullshit, the 90s invented metrosexuality."

"Did it?" he says, po-faced.

"You just like showing your thighs off."

"Well you like looking at them," he says, tipping his chair back.

"I do not," she sputters out. "There just always there aren't they," she waves her hand towards his legs.

"Do you have any other ghost questions?" he asks later, as she washes up her breakfast bowl.

"Um," she thinks, "do you have any special powers?"

"I do, I know when it's going to rain," he says, in that boastful way young boys get when they learn a new football trick.

"Bullshit," she says, "I bet you just watch the forecast like everyone else."

"I'll prove it to you," he says smugly, crossing his arms, and she certainly doesn't watch the way the movement makes the muscles in his biceps pump up, not at all.

 

"It's going to rain," he announces one week later as she's getting ready to leave the flat for work.

She leans towards the kitchen window, looking at the blue sky outside. "No, it isn't," she says.

He shrugs. "Suit yourself," he says.

Sure enough, at exactly half five, when she's gathering herself to leave the office, the heavens open.

"Oh dear," her boss says, "that looks dreadful out there. You're welcome to stay a little longer, I can put the kettle on," he adds, smiling pleasantly.

Torrential rain, and flimsy shoes, versus an hour stuck in the break room with her boss – she'll take the rain every time.

"I told you," Jon says as she staggers into the flat, drenched from head to toe.

"Lucky guess," she spits out, wiping the rain from her face.

"You think so?" Jon asks from the living room sofa, looking delighted at her petulant response.

He tells her it's going to rain again a week later, and again she ignores him, but when the bus breaks down and she has to walk to work in the rain, and arrives so damp that her clothes cling to her skin and Baelish keeps 'popping in' to her office to chat, she concedes to Jon's powers.

"Take an umbrella," he says a few weeks later, lining up his tea cups on the kitchen table for some unfathomable ritual.

"Fine," she says, sighing, and stuffs the umbrella in her already too-full bag.

She returns home from work that day feeling just the tiny bit triumphant.

"It didn't rain today, you were wrong," she declares as she sweeps into the flat.

"I know, I was messing with you," he says from the sofa, where he has his ghost feet up on the coffee table.

"Oh my god, you're impossible," she grits out, slapping the umbrella down on the hall table.

The sound of his laughter follows her into her room, where she sinks down on her bed and groans into her hands. He's the _worst_.

 _Can you kill someone for being extremely annoying, even if they’re already dead? Asking for a friend_ , she texts Margaery.

Margaery texts back with a time and the name of a local cafe, which Sansa first reads as the time and location of Jon's possible second death before she realises Margaery means they should meet up for coffee.

"So let me get this straight," Margaery says, after listening to Sansa's half-an-hour long rant, "sullen expression, regularly drinks from the orange juice carton," she says, counting his offences on her fingertips, "smokes all the time – and I thought the flat was no-smoking?"

"They're technically ghost cigarettes," Sansa says, as Margaery looks at her incredulously. Sansa shrugs. "It doesn't smell of smoke outside his room and he never buys new ones, its the same pack."

"Ok..." Margaery trails off, "anyway, as I was saying: moody expression, listens to too-loud music on his _cassette player_ , wears a kimono and a pair of tiny briefs which, and I quote, _show off everything_. Sansa, darling, you're living with a fuckboy."

Sansa tilts her head to the side. "I'm not sure that a ghost can be a fuckboy if they don't have corporeal form and therefore can't actually sleep with anyone."

"Are you thinking about having sex with a ghost, Sansa?" Margaery queries, looking concerned. "Because I didn't realise your dry spell was quite that bad."

"No! Ew, of course not," Sansa says and shudders. She picks at her toffee muffin. "He can't touch anyone, anyway, his hands go straight through them," she says.

"Hmm," Margaery says, looking at her speculatively and sipping her coffee.

 

"Are you looking for something in the magazines - a message? a sign?" she asks Jon the next weekend, pausing in the doorway of his bedroom. That morning she suddenly realised that if her spare room was indeed a 'cosmic waiting room' then if Sansa finds out the reason why Jon hasn't gone through to _the other side_ yet, he might leave quicker, and she won't have to live with him.

"No, just reading them."

"Wouldn't you prefer a book?" she asks, holding up the current armful she had gotten out from the library.

"Nope," he says, popping the p.

"Degenerate," she mutters to herself as she walks away from the doorway.

She's found herself perusing the magazine aisle in newsagents recently, comparing the magazines to the ones Jon already owns and wondering which titles he's not subscribed to, before leaving with a huff and thinking that he can buy his own bloody magazines.

 

A few days later Sansa has the misfortune to get the winter bug that's going round and sleeps right through both her alarms, being finally woken up by a tentative knock on her bedroom door.

"Yes?" she calls out, her voice thick with cold.

The door opens slowly. "Are you OK?" Jon asks, "you're normally at work an hour ago."

"Shit," she says, fumbling for her phone and then dropping it on the floor. "Shit," she says again and then sneezes and groans. "I feel like death," she says.

"Speaking as one familiar with it, I'd say you look like it too," Jon says, entering her room and ducking down to get her phone.

"Charming," Sansa says, "I can see how you get all the ghost girls."

He laughs at that, and rests a hand on his hip. She has the sudden thought that if he ever wore trousers he'd be the kind of person who always stuffed his hands in his pockets.

"Do you miss trouser pockets?" she asks.

He squints, "are you feverish?"

"A little," she says and sneezes again.

"Right," he says and marches out.

"You can't catch anything!" she calls out, "you're already dead!" and then she cackles to herself and it turns into a long bout of coughing that makes her feel very sorry for herself. She groans, and rests her head gingerly on her pillow.

"Here you go," Jon says, his voice waking her up out of a doze. He puts a tray on top of her lap containing a glass of orange juice, two pieces of toast and honey, and a mug of milky tea. "Orange juice for the Vitamin C, toast to _feed a cold_ , tea because you're grumpy without caffeine."

"I am not," she grumbles, sitting up. "Jon, you gave me some of your orange juice," she says suddenly, sounding awestruck, and feeling a little teary.

He looks concerned again. "And painkillers, for the fever," he says pointedly, setting down a packet on her tray.

"Thank you, Jon," she says, gathering her dignity and trying not to think about her birds nest hair and that her checked pyjamas probably smell of sweat. "This is really nice of you, I don't think anyone apart from my family has ever made me breakfast."

"Not even a boyfriend?"

"Hmm?" she asks, chomping on the toast. "Oh no, I have the worst taste in men."

"Just trying to make sure you survive," he says, "there's only room for one ghost living here."

"Ha ha," she says, but can't hide her pleased little smile as he leaves her with a wave and shuts the door behind him.

 

A few weeks later it's her turn to repay him for being so thoughtful when she notices that he's suffering a particularly black mood, bouncing a ball that he's made out of torn-out magazine pages at the wall endlessly and grunting answers to her perfectly polite questions, sighing every now and then like he has the weight of the world on his shoulders.

"You're really in a mood today," she says.

"You'd be moody if you had to haunt this flat for twenty years," he replies, crossing his arms and looking petulant.

"Right," she decides, putting her hands on her hips, "I know just what you need."

He watches dispassionately as she gathers chairs and blankets and cushions, and pushes the coffee table away from the sofa.

"What are you doing?" he asks finally, as she's draping a blanket across the back of three chairs, weighting it down with a row of cushions.

"I'm making something for you."

"I don't want anything," he says, moodily.

She finishes constructing her masterpiece and stands back. "Just get in the fucking blanket fort," she says to him, pointing at it aggressively.

"Fine," he says spitefully, but she can see his eyes have softened from their grim glare.

He ducks inside.

"Room for one more in there?" she asks.

"Sure, it's not like I take up actual physical space anyway," the voice floating out says mournfully, and she rolls her eyes.

She clambers inside and sits next to him, careful not to touch because she doesn't think it would make him feel any better to be reminded that he can't touch anyone.

They sit there for a few moments, the air warm and cosy.

"Is there a reason why you're stuck here?" she asks softly.

"Not that I know of, and after ten years I stopped thinking about it. I'm a big believer now in mindfulness, in staying in the present," he says, making a shape with his hands in the air and then dropping them and sighing. "But every now and then I feel a bit glum," he admits, turning to look at her. His eyes are even darker inside here, his lips shadowed.

"You'll make a good teacher," he says, after another pause.

"Why? Because I can make a good blanket fort?"

"No, because you're bossy, in a good way," he says, and she tries not to notice the fondness in his voice and on his face.

"Well, anything's better than working for Baelish," she says.

"If I could leave this flat he'd be the first person I'd haunt and annoy on your behalf," he says, stretching his legs out so they peek out into the light of the living room.

"Thank you, Jon, that's surprisingly sweet of you."

"I can be sweet," he argues, "don't judge me on the basis of your shit ex-boyfriends."

"Fine," she says, ignoring how him placing himself alongside her romantic interests makes her heart leap. _There goes only heartbreak_ , she tries to remind herself.

Her warm and fuzzy feelings about Jon are slightly bruised that night however, when she wakes up at some ungodly hour to an odd squeaking noise that she can't place at all. She gets up and staggers out of her room and then yelps when she sees an unrecognisable shape in the doorway of the room opposite hers.

"Jesus fucking Christ," she says, clutching her chest with one hand as the scene in front of her coalesces into Jon doing pull ups on a bar hooked over the doorway.

"Did you think I was a ghost?" he says, smirking and still pulling himself up, flexing his ghost muscles obscenely.

"Can you not exercise at a regular time?"

"I felt the urge to do it now," he says, grunting a little at the end of a pull up which makes her stomach clench.

She marches back inside her room, angry and now horny too. So maybe I do want to fuck a ghost, she mutters to herself, as she wraps herself back in her duvet, but so what.

 

The next day she comes home from work to find Jon standing in the middle of the living room rug while a larger man with a kind, flustered face circles around him with a Geiger counter telling Jon to 'concentrate'.

"What the hell?" she asks, dropping her shopping bags by the door.

"Sam used to have your room," Jon says, and she waits for either of them to explain the scene in front of her.

"I'm trying to find a cure for his current," Sam pauses, "status. But-" he says, groaning as he gets up from a kneel and stands back, "-I don't think science is going to have the answer."

"I could have told you that years ago," Jon says, reaching over for his glass of orange juice and downing the lot of it.

Sansa watches Sam perform various odd tests all evening and when she goes to bed she lays awake thinking. The next morning she phones Melisandre.

"If I was looking for a way to help Jon move on," Sansa tries to ask casually, "you know, to _the other side_ , how would I go about that?"

"Oh, try a cleansing spell I suppose," Melisandre says, sounding bored. "It's the person doing the spell that's the important thing, not the spell itself," she then says, trailing off mysteriously.

"Right, good, cleansing spell," Sansa says, after a pause of half a minute has tested even her politeness. "Thanks!"

She takes Margaery with her to the local Wicca shop, feeling nervous and out of her depth, but as it turns out they're very friendly in there and she's sent away with a big bag full of candles, herbs, crystals, and a large glossy spellbook. She can't explain why she has a feeling that one of the spells is going to work, and she knows that Margaery thinks she's only cracking under some combination of lust and annoyance at his continued presence, but she feels she has to try at least.

She leaves Margaery at a bus stop and walks home through the crisp winter afternoon, steps almost bouncing. She's a winter child and she's always loved December - the cold air, the warm socks and jumpers, the hot chocolate. One of her exes used to say that she was unnatural for preferring it to summer, but then he only liked the warmer months because it meant he could wear sleeveless tops and announce _sun's out guns out_ every morning.

She plonks her shopping down on the kitchen table and gets everything out as Jon drifts into the room.

"What's all that?"

"Stuff for spells," she says, sheepishly, "supplies from the Wicca shop." She stops and rests her hands on the table, looking at him. "Melisandre, and the girls at the shop, think that a spell might help you move on," she says. "I mean-"

"I know what you mean," he says softly, and comes closer, fingering a candle and a purple stone.

"Has anyone tried a spell before?"

"Not with this amount of stuff," he says, "and the single-minded dedication I know you're going to bring to this task, Miss Stark," he says, smiling.

"I'm not going to do spellwork with my pupils, if I ever get to be a teacher," she says, unwrapping some sage and sniffing it.

"Of course you're going to be a teacher," he says, fixing his gaze to hers, "and you'll be great."

"Thanks," she says, feeling her cheeks warm. "Do you want me to try some spells tomorrow? I'm sorry, it's really presumptuous of me to bring all this here and decide to do something like this without asking you."

"I do," he says, nodding and scratching at the back of his head. "I think it's time," he says, "if I stay here any longer I'll just go mad." He smiles ruefully.

"Tomorrow," she says, and moves her supplies over to the kitchen counter. Then she leans against it and stares at him.

"Now what?" he asks.

She shrugs. "What do you want to do?" she asks, without adding _on your last day here_ , even though they both must be thinking it.

"Well, I've got my orange juice," he says, "and my cigarettes," he waves the packet. "How about you make me another blanket fort?"

"Sure," she says, and she makes him the best damn blanket fort she's ever seen in her life, dragging the fairy lights from her room too and hanging them over the top so the inside seems even more magical.

"You've outdone yourself, sweetheart," he says, and she lets out a little sigh at the pet name.

"So, what are you going to miss about this flat?" she asks.

"The way the fridge creaks at night," he says, leaning back on his hands, "and the noise of the boiler kicking in. The crack in the window frame in my room that whistles in a storm, the leak in the bathroom, the way the kitchen table is warped so that if you put something spherical on it it'll roll right into the middle, the top bookshelf which is too short to hold any books so you have to stack them in piles, the uneven gap below the front door, the missing fringe on one side of the living room rug, the opera singer who lives upstairs and sings in the middle of the night at weekends but never seems to wake you up, the smell of the crisp factory nearby that wafts in on hot summer days-"

"You really have been here a long time, haven't you," she says, after listening to the first part of his list - all the small things she has yet to notice about the flat.

"The door buzzer which sounds furious," he continues, "the way footsteps echo in the stairwell of the building, the light fitting that always goes when it's cold, the mice that sometimes visit," he trails off, and rubs a hand over his chin.

"Any other particular living things?" she asks.

"I can't think of anything," he says nonchalantly.

"Not the company?" she prods.

"Hmm, not really," he says, and smirks, and she wishes he were corporeal only so that she could push him over.

 

She wakes early the next morning to find Jon waiting for her in the living room, her supplies out on the coffee table.

"Is there anyone you want to say goodbye to before I start trying the spells? Like family, friends from your old life?" she asks, as she rolls up her sleeves and opens the first marked page.

"I don't really remember my old life," he says, shaking his head, "it's all a bit fuzzy and dreamlike, I don't remember faces or even what job I had. I certainly don't remember how I ended up like this," he says. How he ended up dead, she thinks, and then feels sad at the thought of his relatives and friends missing him. "I don't think there's anyone out there," he says, shrugging.

"Maybe you'll meet people you recognise in the next place you go," she suggests.

"Maybe," he says hopefully.

"And you still want me to do this, to try and help you."

"I do," he says, and then holds out his arms "do your worst, witch."

She sighs. "None of the spells are very dramatic," she says, "it's mostly lighting candles and wafting incense around."

"No blood?" he asks, a little disappointed.

"No," she says, "no animal sacrifice either."

"Well, waft away," he says, sweeping an arm out imperiously and then sitting down on the sofa to watch her.

In the end it seems to be the eighth spell she tries, or maybe a combination of the ones previously, because as she's chanting and moving a stick of burning sage from corner to corner Jon suddenly sits bolt upright.

"I feel a bit weird," he says.

"Good weird?" she asks, looking over her shoulder as she smudges the last corner.

"Uh huh," he says. "Sansa," he says urgently and stares at her. "I'll miss you most of all," he says, smiling sadly, and then he completely disappears.

"Jon!" she calls out, "Jon!" She stares at the space on the sofa where he was sitting and then she races around the rest of the flat, searching in cupboards and under blankets, not noticing when she starts to cry.

She picks up her phone and calls Margaery. "Help," she says when her friend answers, "he's gone," she sobs out.

"I thought that was what you both wanted."

"It was," Sansa wails.

"I'll be right there, darling," Margaery says and Sansa can hear Margaery's front door click shut through the phone and her breath get short as her friend starts to run.

"OK," Sansa says, and slumps down on the sofa, putting a hand over the spot Jon where had been as if she could still feel a coldness or a warmth there.

"I figured it's kind of like a breakup, right?" Margaery says, as Sansa opens the door for her. "So I brought DVDs, ice cream and a bottle of Baileys." She waggles her arms to show her load. "You look terrible," she says to Sansa as she takes in her tear-strewn cheeks and red nose.

"That's just the sort of thing Jon would have said," she says, with a sniffle.

"Oh girl," Margaery says, and bundles the both of them up in a blanket on the sofa, peeling the lid off the ice cream and setting it down in front of them.

"Would this have felt even worse if I had slept with him?" Sansa ponders mournfully.

"He did have an _amazing-in-bed_ look about him," Margaery says. She'd met him a few times when she came to Sansa's flat before a night out.

"Not helpful Margaery," Sansa mumbles around her ice cream spoon.

"I know," she says, tucking an arm around her and squeezing.

 

Life goes on without Jon, although Sansa purposefully doesn't tell Melisandre that he's left because she dreads someone else taking over his room. She finally hands in her notice at work, declining Baelish's offer of leaving drinks, and gets an assistant job at the local primary school that she can do alongside her Masters starting soon.

When she gets the job acceptance there's only one person she wants to tell the news to first, but he isn't here. She buys a carton of orange juice in his honour instead, and drinks half of it while watching a mindless cookery programme on TV.

A knock on the front door brings her out of her grumpy loll on the sofa and she trudges over to open it.

"Hi, I heard you're looking for a roommate," Jon says, standing on her doorstep.

"Oh my god, what are you wearing?" she gasps, staring at his legs encased in regular skinny jeans, his torso in a henley and a jacket, and the glasses perched on his face which make him look like every dirty English teacher fantasy she'd ever had.

"I thought I'd dress up nice for you," he says.

"To be honest I think I miss the briefs," she chokes out.

"You might see them later, if you're lucky," he says, waggling his eyebrows.

Suddenly, the realisation that he's returned, that he somehow exists outside of the walls of the flat, makes tears bead in her eyes and her heart flutter in her chest.

"Now," he says, watching her chin wobble, "I'm a little out of practise, twenty years to be precise, but would you like a hug?"

"Yes, yes please," she says, and is then enveloped by his strong, warm, arms. She sniffles into his neck.

"The hug's that good, huh?" he says.

"Don't mock me," she says. "I can't believe you're alive."

"Neither could I," he says, "I thought this was some kind of strange heaven until I almost got run over by the number 31 bus this morning. Luckily Melisandre found me wandering about and took me to her flat to put on some clothes. Do I look alright?" he asks, "I've not really been reading any fashion magazines."

"You look great," she says, squeezing him to her tightly. She can't believe he's right here, and _alive_.

She nuzzles at his neck and feels him shiver in response. Suddenly, she wonders just how touch-starved someone can be after twenty years as a ghost, and the thought of Jon lying out on her bed at her mercy, aching for her to touch him, sounds impossibly good.

"I know you were perfectly fine with the mattress in your room, but do you fancy checking out the one in mine, just for comparison's sake?" she asks.

"Very smooth, Miss Stark," he says and then lifts her - lifts her! - and brings her legs round his waist, carrying her right into her bedroom and dropping her down on her bed so fast she feels a little bit breathless.

It turns out that as eager as Jon is to be touched, he's even more eager to do the touching, and dedicated at it too, and phenomenally good with his tongue, and many other superlative descriptions that she can't think of right now with the way he's staring at her from between her legs, eyes dark and wicked.

They don't get out of bed for two days and it's only after the first week, when she's stopped pouncing on him the minute she gets back from work, that they sit down to work out the practicalities of him moving back in, of him being a real person again and not a ghost.

"I should probably tell you that this flat is technically in my name, shouldn't I, the whole building is," he says as he puts the kettle on and grabs a mug. His belongings - the magazines, the cigarette pack and his collection of teacups and teapots - had disappeared at the same time he had.

"Are you saying you're rich?" she asks.

"I'm a man of leisure," he says, smirking. "Luckily, whatever spell you did has left me with my old name and ID," he says, "and the rent has been going into my account for twenty years which has left me with a nice nest egg."

" _Nest egg_ ," she says, "you sound like an old man."

"I am an old man," he says, smiling, and she scoffs and then leans over the kitchen table to kiss him.

"Have you found out anything about before?" she asks.

"I think it's wise to leave things as they are," he says. "I don't have a next of kin according to my bank records and I don't really want to hunt around and find out what happened."

"OK, if you're sure," she says.

"I am. Mindfulness, remember, living in the present," he does that same odd shape with his hands.

"What _is_ that?" she asks.

"What?"

"That thing you did with your hands." She does an impression of him.

"I did not just do that," he says.

"Yes you did."

"Perhaps Sam used to watch a lot of TED talks when he lived here," he concedes, "and I was bored and watched them over his shoulder."

"Will you do your own talk now - 'what I learned after twenty years as a half-naked ghost'," she mocks.

"Half-naked? I wore socks!" he says, outraged.

"Did you?" she tilts her head.

"You might not have noticed because you were too busy perving on my package," he says.

" _Package_ ," she repeats incredulously, and giggles.

"Right you, that's enough mockery for now," he says, and hoists her into his arms, carrying her into the bedroom.

 

It takes Sansa a little time but she slowly comes to believe that Jon is here to stay and starts venturing out with him to the shops and to bars and to the cinema almost every weekend because he says he's missed out on a lot of popular culture and she likes watching how excited he gets at every new film. She introduces him to her friends and family too, making up a story about being his lodger so that it's only Margaery who knows that he was ever a ghost.

That he _was_ a ghost becomes increasingly strange to her, her memories hazy like they aren't quite real. He's so solid to her now, so physical, it seems impossible to think he hadn't always been like that. The way he holds her to him while they sleep, the arm he always places around her shoulders, the wonderfully long hugs he gives her when they're reunited after a day apart, the slow morning kisses, the _sex_ , the time he carried her through the rain when one of her heels broke, the piggyback he gave her across the park when he was trying to cheer her up after a tough day at school.

They argue and mock each other just as much as they did before, and are as kind and thoughtful as they were too, and Sansa feels extraordinary lucky to have found him and when she tells him that he says, _I feel lucky to have found you too, sweetheart_ , which makes her melt, until he does something annoying like drink straight from the apple juice carton (he's branched out in juices) or continue doing pull ups in the middle of the night.

 

On their first anniversary, they're browsing antique shops after a long lunch with lots of wine, when she finds a teacup that reminds her of his old collection and she buys it, making him roll his eyes fondly at her and then kiss her long enough to have the shop assistant make a tutting noise and make them leave.

It becomes a tradition, her buying old teacups or teapots around their anniversary (the anniversary of Jon coming back to life that is) even when they're on holiday or visiting her family up north. It's only twelve years later, when she's walking up and down the kitchen floor trying to soothe their third, surprise, baby when she looks down at her collection and realises that they don't just look _like_ the teacups and teapots he owned before but are in fact _exactly_ identical.

She wakes Jon up and drags him into the kitchen as he blearily rubs his eyes.

"Is she OK?" he asks about their daughter.

"She's fine, teething probably," Sansa says. "But look at this," she says, pointing at the sideboard.

"Yes, they're very nice," he says.

"They're exactly the same as yours! Exactly!" she says.

"Did you not realise that before?"

"No!" she whispers, outraged.

He shrugs.

"I don't understand time, or time loops, or fate," she says mournfully.

Jon puts an arm around her and kisses her on the cheek and then kisses their daughter on the cheek too who looks up at him adoringly.

"I don't think we need to," he says.

"I guess," she says, and yawns.

"Time to put my two girls back to bed," he says, "before we wake the boys." And she lets herself be led back to their bedroom, placing the baby back in her crib, and snuggling up to her very-much-alive husband.

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> please comment, I'd love to hear what people think!
> 
> apologies that this got *super* fluffy towards the end, and for the rather large gaps in plot logic.
> 
> my tumblr: [framboise-fics](http://framboise-fics.tumblr.com)
> 
> and there's a rebloggable photoset for this fic [here](https://framboise-fics.tumblr.com/post/166906000052/sansas-new-flat-is-perfect-perfect-that-is)


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